In 1970, John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon, two film students at the University of Southern California, were working on a little sci-fi movie, and realised they couldn't compete with the dazzling spectacle of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But they could expand on what Kubrick only hinted at in his epic: the extreme boredom of long-term space travel.

The eponymous craft in this film has been travelling for some two decades. Its light-speed velocity means its crew has hardly aged, however, and close confinement, coupled with a ship that keeps malfunctioning, has its slightly unhinged characters bickering across the great expanses of the universe. Their mission is to destroy unstable planets in systems marked for future colonisation; one more bomb to drop and they can finally go home. It's a smart, cynical look at space travel, treating it as a blue-collar job and not a divine calling as Kubrick and others would have you believe.

Dark Star was originally a 45-minute graduation short. Most of the middle section, where O'Bannon hunts down a goofy beachball-like alien, was added to pad it out to feature length – and later rehashed by O'Bannon for his bug-hunt classic screenplay: Alien.